WASHINGTON – The Semiconductor Industry Association has called on the US government to refrain from any more restrictions on chip sales to China, saying additional measures against the country could disrupt supply chains and prompt continued retaliation from China. 

"Recognizing that strong economic and national security require a strong U.S. semiconductor industry, leaders in Washington took bold and historic action last year to enact the CHIPS and Science Act to strengthen our industry’s global competitiveness and de-risk supply chains," the SIA said in a statement released this week. "Allowing the industry to have continued access to the China market, the world’s largest commercial market for commodity semiconductors, is important to avoid undermining the positive impact of this effort. Repeated steps, however, to impose overly broad, ambiguous, and at times unilateral restrictions risk diminishing the U.S. semiconductor industry’s competitiveness, disrupting supply chains, causing significant market uncertainty, and prompting continued escalatory retaliation by China.

"We call on both governments to ease tensions and seek solutions through dialogue, not further escalation. And we urge the administration to refrain from further restrictions until it engages more extensively with industry and experts to assess the impact of current and potential restrictions to determine whether they are narrow and clearly defined, consistently applied, and fully coordinated with allies."

The Biden administration is considering updating a sweeping set of rules imposed in October to hobble China's chip industry and a new executive order restricting some outbound investment, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other top government officials met with chip company chief executives to discuss the the industry and supply chains after Blinken's recent trip to China, Reuters reported.

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